The Quality of Mercy is an excellent choice for a penultimate episode of the season. It has some light hearted bits while also expanding on the universe in interesting ways. We get new information on Centauri biology and Minbari morality. It also lets Richard Biggs do something when Dr. Franklin has not been a meaningful part of several episodes leading up to it. All in all it serves as a great palate cleanser before we move on to the much more serious Chrysalis next week.
We open with Londo getting a patronizing talking to from an unnamed minister. This is Damien London’s first appearance as this character, and he gets to show up over and over again as a court functionary for the Centauri Republic. I like him, both for his performance itself and, as with Vir, for showing that the Centauri are not a monolith and that it takes all kinds to run an interplanetary empire. In any case Londo is dismissive of the call. If this is your first time watching, at this point you maybe not realize what his gesture means, even if it is lamp shaded by the statue behind him. He leaves his quarters in a huff and bumps into Lennier, and decides to take Lennier under his wing in order to scam him for some free drinks. From that humble beginning disaster looms. We will come back to this.
We jump to more serious action with Jim Norton, returning as Ombuds Wellington, passing judgement on a prisoner named Karl Mueller, played by Mark Rolston of Aliens fame. Wellington finds him guilty of three murders, and we jump to the opening narration.
When we come back, Ivanova is walking through down below, and barges in on Franklin who is running an unauthorized free clinic. She dresses him down briefly, before promising to help him keep it running. Her passing comment about how there are only half a dozen patients waiting to see him, concerns Franklin and he goes in search of his missing patients.
We go back to Garibaldi advocating that they toss Mueller out an airlock, complete with an icky reference to eugenics. Garibaldi shares that why he is so angry: Mueller killed a security officer and he has a hunch that the murders they have him on are just the tip of the iceberg. Wellington lays out their options. They can send him back to Earth, but Earth does not want to pay to transport him. Garibaldi points out they cant really use the B5 brig for a life sentence. Which brings them to the last legal option they have, which will involve Talia having to scan the murderer, something she is reluctant to do. I like that the judge quickly shoots down Garibaldi’s suggestion that Talia poke around inside the killer’s mind for the other murders. Due process matters to some people in the future at least.
Franklin ends up finding another clinic being run by a woman named Laura Rosen (played by June Lockhart of Lost in Space). She has an alien machine that she claims can heal people. Franklin is skeptical and somewhat insulting. He gets pounced on by Rosen’s daughter Janice, played by Kate McNeil, who defends her mother’s practice and kicks him out.
Mueller gets formally sentenced to the death of personality. His brain will be wiped, and he will be given a new personality that is programmed to serve others. As a sci-fi concept it is interesting, though it has some obvious problems that will get explored in a later episode, in addition to the unsettling Orwellian aspects. Garibaldi and Franklin discuss the procedure, and Garibaldi does some more gross cop stuff, including asking that the process not be painless.
Franklin moves on to confronting Janice about her mother in the Zocalo. He gets the story that Laura had become addicted to a legal stimulant, imaginatively called “stims”. She took too much and made a fatal mistake with a patient and lost her medical license. She then went in search of alien healing technology, hoping that she could find something that would restore her reputation. Still not convinced he pulls patient records, but is shocked to find that the ones going to Rosen are getting better.
Talia begins getting ready for her part in the sentence against Mueller. I like that they even show her putting a black bar across her Psi-Corps insignia. Her organization at least is not under the impression that this is not an execution. Mueller tries to intimidate her, and she gets down to it. We get treated to some fairly standard serial killer stuff. Garibaldi was right, Mueller has killed many many people, and considers them all part of his choir. She finishes her scan while in distress and has to be helped out of the room by some of the guards.
Franklin sneaks over to her clinic and secretly scans a patient while Rosen works (so much for medical ethics). He notices that the patient is doing better, and that Rosen is doing worse because of using the machine. She lets him know, in a way that dovetails with the B plot of the episode, that the machine is actually a means of capital punishment. It takes energy from one person and gives it to another. She has figured out how to use it on low settings to help people. Rosen reveals that she is dying of something called Lakes Syndrome. She is hoping to use her remaining time to figure out the machine. She also reveals that her own daughter does not fully understand what the machine does to her. She agrees to let Franklin in on studying the machine under the condition that he not tell Janice about how the machine works.
Talia recovers from her ordeal in a park, and Garibaldi goes to speak with her. She is still shaken by her scan of Mueller. She even lets him know, unofficially, that he was right on Mueller having more than those three murders under his belt. Garibaldi leaves to escort Mueller to his appointment, and Mueller escapes but takes a shot from Garibaldi in the process. Franklin puts two and two together about Mueller’s injury and runs to try and warn the Rosens, where he finds Mueller already there holding them hostage and forcing Laura to heal him. Mueller starts threatening everyone, so Laura reverses the flow on the machine and pushes it to its full power. It pretty quickly kills Mueller.
Wellington now has to pass judgement on Laura. He decides she was acting in self-defense, but seizes her machine and hands it over to the station. Rosen is relieved to not go to jail, but she is feeling guilt about killing someone, even with Garibaldi’s assurance that she did the right thing. The guilt is compounded by the knowledge that not only did she kill Mueller, but by killing him she cured herself of her disease and may live another twenty years with the knowledge that she violated her medical oath and took a life.
In our other adventure Londo brings Lennier to a strip club, where the religious Minabri is pretty out of his element. Londo pulls the “I forgot my wallet” trick on him, which works due to his naivete. We also learn a fun fact about Minbari, in that they cannot tolerate even the smallest amount of alcohol without being psychotically violent. Londo quickly regrets his scheme when a sober Lennier regales him with stories of his linguistic studies at temple. He perks up though, when he learns that Lennier is an expert in probability and quickly takes him from the strip joint, to the casino.
Lennier shows that he is pretty good at working the odds at poker, but he is not great at bluffing. Still he is winning by a comfortable margin, before Londo decides to catch up by cheating. He unbuttons his coat and a small tentacle sneaks to the other side of the table and steals a card from the deck. This works for him until someone accidentally puts a drink pitcher down on his tentacle. This exposes his scheme, and the other players attack. Lennier does a great job of defending Londo but soon the whole casino is in on the fight.
L&L survive their casino fight, and are being interrogated by Sinclair, when something interesting happens. A maxim repeated by many characters is that Minbari do not lie. Yet Lennier lies to cover for Londo, and gets them more or less off the hook. Lennier reveals that in their culture you may lie to help another save face. Lennier only asks for an explanation of how Londo cheated in return. Londo directs his attention to the statue of Li, the goddess of passion. He points out that the goddess is supposed to be both male and female and that she has tentacles. Lennier is sufficiently weirded out to proclaim that he will never speak of any of this again.
Next week we come to the end of Season 1 with episode 22 “Chrysalis”. A bunch of different plots get shifted sideways as we push on to season 2, where a bunch more will get completely blown up due to outside circumstances.
As always, a reminder that you can watch the episodes on Tubi with ads. It is apparently back on Amazon Prime, but Tubi is free and their ad breaks are smaller.
The Good
- I always enjoy Richard Biggs, though I know he is not necessarily a fan favorite. I don’t mind when he gets foregrounded since I like the empathetic and very caring character. Especially when compared to Garibaldi.
- I like the fleshing out of Earth’s criminal justice system. Just a nice bit of world building.
- The alien healing device is an interesting concept. Something that would complicate discussions of capital punishment I am sure.
The Bad
- Not too much bad in this episode, though the constant reminders that Earth, or at least Babylon 5, does not have universal healthcare are depressing.
- Despite trying out different ways of doing it, they couldn’t figure out a good reason for June Lockhart and Bill Mumy to have a Lost in Space reunion which would have been nice.
Arc Points (Spoilers Ahead)
- The alien healing device shows up a few more times. Kind of lazy that JMS wrote himself an undo button for any character death, but at least he gave it a serious enough downside that it would not get abused.
- Minbari honesty will also come up again, and I like that since they are so insular that this is a shock even to someone that has been around as long as Londo.
- Moving forward I always get a chuckle from Londo making his “suck this” gesture by waving at his torso. Sci-fi is more fun when aliens are alien.
- The death of personality will also feature heavily in a great stand alone episode of Season 3.